


An Unpredictable Element

by thequirkyduckling



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Dark, Developing Relationship, F/M, Gang Violence, Kylo Ren Angst, Modern Era, Past Drug Addiction, Reylo - Freeform, Self-Healing, Wickedly Wonderful Week of Reylo
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-09-06
Updated: 2016-09-06
Packaged: 2018-08-13 08:28:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 6,227
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7969609
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thequirkyduckling/pseuds/thequirkyduckling
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>",  Rey isn’t one to give up on her work.  He can see it in her little flowers, her little joyful undertakings that have blossomed from her toil.  But has she ever tangled with something <em>poisonous</em> like him?   ,"</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Foreword

They link arms, drudging through the crowds with a grace ballasted by their own starry-spaced infatuation, locked in a heart-humming capsule.

All around there is thundering diaspora, arbitrary freckles of life, spinning on their heels, crashing and circling around them like constellations, ordinary people star-crossed, trapped with little gravity to change course, they all spacemen with big, jigsaw-shaped ships that they all named existence. 

She is a _daystar_ among the slime. 

Ben thinks that is a corny thing to admit, even privately within his mind. But he see’s her, with no-orbit hula-hoop reigning her in, sun-soaked and joy proud. She is sucking him into the warm shallows, with her flushed skin and dimpled smile, the back tail of her skirt blowing kisses, sweet peeks of her strawberry scar appearing on her right thigh when the warm wind breezes by. 

She must be shy of that part of her skin, just as he is fearful of the jungle-vine scars on his arms. 

A flurry of balloons escape, spinning shapes and colors over the crowds. He sees that Rey is transfixed by this, and thus so is he. She loosens from him, her hand sliding down his arm as her eyes reach out to absorb the sight of the traveling balloons. 

It is a natural reaction, like the vice-snap of a magnet to its counterpart. He can feel a foam at the back of his eyes, warm and lumen, as his hand catches her own soft, incredibly softer fingers. 

He doesn’t want her to float off, to be adrift with lightly, sylph-like disasters that are so her. The chaos of balloons releasing _so, so, so_ much like her, that he knows that if he lets go, she will too disappear into the high blue of the skyline, like a child’s dream or a bird’s moment. 

He is holding her hand. Ben forgets if this is appropriate for the first date, forgets the mannerisms of courtship that stupid fact and figures try to nail into his brain. He is helplessly lodged here, between abortion or parasite. She is the only firmness he has known for a while and that frightens him. 

How was he to know that such people existed, people with such fierce wonder and bliss, that anyone could persuade him into dancing at the ballroom of joviality? 

She is the taste, the tippy essence of having pride back in life, stuffing his stitched insides back into a mold of ordinary. He pulls her back and is itching to release her hand, her flesh hot as a silver laid out for the sun. 

But he thinks in a wet, bolt-clashing storm, rain of calm seeping on the wildfire of his insecurities. The word occurs to him, rearing its ugly head on a roundabout, blowing raspberries. 

_Rehabilitation. Rehabilitation. Rehabilitation._

The broken record plays on, it must be his permanent ode on repeat, black marker filling in the whites of his eyes. 

He wants _this._

This pain and satisfaction of walking on hot coals, for if he slips, he will be cremated on a pyre. Ben thinks of falling in love and correlates it to the lottery, inching desert road on empty in a convertible, the top off, bleaching until combusting into flame. 

Ben likes to think of launching a rocket into space with the windows rolled down. 

He is not one to see the odds in the dice, but he can’t but help venture the chances and mathematical variables of perusing a relationship. The children end up fatherless by the time he lists off his juvenile delinquency records, A-Z from spray paint to shoot up to fuck up. 

How piggishly royal of him to think of parenthood, as if such a thing could befit him, it would be like wiggling into cilice skinny jeans. His kids could connect the dots between his pseudoaneurysms, or use his rubber-made tourniquets for their piggy tails. 

He could pay for their university shooting the teller behind the ear. He can spoil Rey of her brightness, like water leaking behind the wallpaper. He could create a dystopia from between her legs and she would love him no less for it. 

His head is on fire now, retracing his fuckery, his flesh-enticed failing that landed him here, holding her, this fucking _too-perfect_ human. This spotlight illuminating all the crevices of his darkness, the slough of cockroaches scattering from his bedsheets.

Rey has retracted from the bustling crowd, collecting back against his side. 

Her hand is still, still in his. 

He recites numbers, any digit he can muster into numerical order, counting back or forwards, breathing through his mental push ups, her hand now a spider with legs creeping and fangs dragging along his knuckles. 

Can sunlight feel the existence of darkness or does it just obliterate on an unending journey across the galaxy? Ben thinks that if he looks to their hands intertwined, his skin would be glowing rose like a hand clutching a flashlight. 

Ben’s free hand is binary in principal, to make a fist or not to, he practices when she isn’t looking. His life is shaped in two, left or right, light or dark, right from wrong. He sees the forked choice here, Rey or his masochistic abode? 

His decision is swept up from him, when Rey with her eyes sparkling like dewed green on a morning tree, squeezes his straining hand in reassurance, and tells an off-colored joke that makes him laugh. 

He just knew she could patch a gunshot wound with a wisecrack. There is a hole in his head that she could sweetly fuck.

Rey, an urban fairy, a junkyard nymphet with powers to invoke men into her waters. She could piece back this broken vase inside his chest with only her chewing gum.

Ben considers it, that if he stays near her, he could heal and if not that, she would be a nice, warm place to rest before walking back into the pig-packing plant. 

He wonders if Rey is thinking the same thing. Picturing him as a project, a gordian knot with a million variables to unkink and riddle. He hardly thinks that she pictures him in a romantic sense anymore, his quick-dry charm of their first encounter may have already dried into a gangrenous rash. 

Rey isn’t one to give up on her work. He can see it in her little flowers, her little joyful undertakings that have blossomed from her toil. But has she ever tangled with something _poisonous_ like him?


	2. A Blessing in Disguise

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Kylo stumbles on an important discovery.

o0o

The skies are red, the river brown. His home always appears to be alive with fire, the trees with spindly greenery the only evidence of lushness. The buildings tower around the river banks, pested by people, a great many stony giants rooting into the soil to sup. The feral twine is ivy and wire around these gargantuan' limbs, silty sand the color of stinging sumac spice, it shrouds the narrow streets, staining the bare feet that promenade the filthy city.

Ben watches from his vantage point, a creaky loge, as ducks skid across the murk, crystal reflection the color of turmeric. The heat is sweltering, the papery trees rattling in the light wind, the reek of the city thick as cracked eggs. He smokes, white shirt loose around his malnourished body, lanky hair bundled up with a wrist tie. The balcony is overgrown with mangrove, decrepit, the building overrun with pestering langurs. 

It's the only place he and his wife can afford. 

There is clattering, the inconsequential clamor from the depths beneath his pigeonhole, banging pots and pans, contending banter of trade, barking langurs and squealing, unhappy children. This is Coruscant, Bangladesh. 

A collection of sister villages, that form a monocity whored to honey and fish extraction. Ben flits his eyes to the horizon, the upriver, with jungles thick as steel wool, sappy with beehives, roaming with man-eating tigers, venomous snakes, pitfalls, and merciless boat pirates. 

It is nearing the time to venture back to the forest to claim a meek fortune. His families hunger imposing him to do so.

They have nothing to eat, the smell of cooked rice from below is intoxicating, his stomach cramping. He breaks off another chunk of banana into his mouth, the tasteless musa the cheapest most abundant fruit available. 

He loathes it. 

He curls the watery fruit in his mouth a few, precious seconds more, savoring the food he repulses. He needs his strength renewed for the approaching days. 

A old woman, bundled in a thousand color silks, top teeth missing, sucks her gums at him. She is beside him on the balcony, sat on her plush, mute. She is signing for him to come rest beside her, she has seen the progression of her sons and husbands all before they left for the wood, she knows what his preparations should be. 

She is his grandmother by law. His wife calls her Maya. He calls her Mayma. The moniker far more personal to him, sounding favorably familiar to the English word _Mama_. 

His eyes are dusky, smile aloof, "Mayma, don't you want to eat?" She stuffs some pulp into her mouth, munching and spitting. She is listening to some relentless Bollywood chatter, she is almost completely deaf, so the radio blares and he is blissfully ignored. 

He collapses next to her, weaving one of her many scarves around his neck, leaning in for comfort and attention. She offers him a black and gum-filled smile, touching his sharp-angled face, aquiline nose, and curly locks. She offers him a crusty laugh, draping the scarf like a woman does across his lips and cheekbones. 

The plucky fowl ink their feathers in the horizon waters.

The monkeys are fairing better. They are not wilting out starved here in the light. The scavengers are gonna live and he is going to die in silken, moth-eaten, scarves.

Their black masks with a fringe of fur study him from above the balcony, little mouths smacking with stolen food. The palms of their four feet slapping across the clay shingles, tails whipping as they spring from roof to roof. 

His grandmother makes a noise of pain, a keynote that's not discerned most times, but he catches the subtle noise and watches her carefully. Her knuckles are swollen, flaring in pain from twisting a part of his hair into a braid. 

He is the man of the house, he is responsible for their suffering and their joy.

Ben massages her aged hand, as she so thusly insists on grooming his coiled hair with her other free hand. She has a childlike wonderment for him, for his skin pallid as dough, the long bones of his face different from the squat arrangements of her own, his springy darkly mane, even awe down to his beauty marks and moles that fleck his skin like an appaloosa. 

He hears stirring deeper within the hovel, his wife is moving, like leafy shade in the wind. She is setting plates, even though there is nothing to feast, she does this out of practice.

She still will not speak to him. She will not allow him to see her. She wants a child. But his eyes, they cannot stop seeing the poverty swarmed around them, vultures with wings dipped for them. 

He sees homeless, orphaned children on the dusty streets, pleading and begging. He can hear them now, howling and wailing. 

He will not sire a misery. This world is fat enough on it.

His wife, Anuhya, has rose-colored glasses for the world. That is how he fell in love with her the first time, how he fell ceaseless times after that. She can see the things in the dark, those difficult hopes of light, gliding snow at frozen dusk. 

His father told him of spirits that hid in the snow, of the light at dusk and dawn that could reveal them. That these souls would carry lanterns to those who found them. 

In his heart there is ash, ash from the sticks used for smoking hives out. This land is smoke and fire, sand and clay, burnt out dreams. But his home, that forbidden place lost in the sea, he remembers where he came from, he recollects the ice and water, the salt and gale, staring up at the fluttering sun masked with grey. 

Coruscant has become a cup with a crack, just as his former had become an icy grave. There his burns could be healed with grains of salt, here they are slathered with honey. 

There is no lesser in these two evils.

His wife crafts with other women of the village, needlework and bead patterns, or fashioning bangles for India's and Western privileged. He supposes these sewing circles had gotten this baby nonsense cored rotten into her head. 

Where they had met in the dark streets under lantern light, kohl smeared on their eyes, drinking fresh milk, she had no aspirations for a brood. He had promised her nothing, she had thought that was better than anything. 

But now she seethes, she reasons that she was cheated. She cries and groans her agony, her restlessness in this stagnant piece of life, she fears the price of it, fears the years of nihility that will weigh her like stones to the belly of the lake. 

Ben fears the day when she will no longer carry his body with her towards the losing light.

Mayma dials up the radios chattering when Anuhya starts shouting, bemoaning the cruelty of childlessness, the unfairness of it all. 

Ben places his face into his hands.

 

 

_Five Years Later_

There are no dreams of screams sapping his throat, scalding torches in the eyes of a beast, or crunching bones in the teeth, this morning he counts it as a blessing.

He descends the wooden narrow stairs from his bedroom to the kitchen. He is wrapped in a cloak, feet bare. An aroma of smoke and honey still stuck in his head.

The house is too cold today, so carefully he tampers with the thermostat, watching the needle bounce. The whole house creaks when the furnace enlivens. 

His parents, small, saltbox home eases from the frigid night. Ben notices frost on the circle window on the stairs. His eyes itch on the fractal light swarming from the filigree ice. 

His ritual for breakfast is dedicated by the docket. There is the paper filled by the nurse on the fridge, today he is jocundly not responsible for meal preparation. In norm, he would have to prepare a hearty meal for his mother, one mostly masticated to a pudding or pulp, easy for her frail digestion. But today, the house nurse would be arriving early, staying throughout the day for every meal and bath. 

And the most important task, enrichment, something he had difficulty offering his distanced mother. It was what inspired him to seek further help with the situation. 

Ben eyes the key ring on the coat hook, the key to the lighthouse practically glowing. He should check on the outlying building as well, get an early start as soon as the home nurse arrived to tend to his mother.

He eases in the Dante, where his mothers wool spools and knitting needles used to rest, always near use. He remembers pressing into her skirts, building empires with blocks, her fingers carefully mapping his small skull for her projects, fingers picking through hair tufted with black wool and brambles, his eyes like blackberries were always ripe under his mothers loving heed. 

He tries not to recall the days where his eyes would rot and sour at the mere sight of her. 

Ben is keen to venture to the lighthouse, if the morning ends up still dark, he can watch the dawn sprout, inching like a fingernail. 

He has little thought in the morning, a welcomed fogginess has enshrouded his memories, those whetted images pressing to the surface with great harrowing. Like muskrats drowning in a felled den, straw and mud crushing in, razory teeth gnashing for freedom. 

Although he cannot see them, cannot recollect those drowned visions, he can hear the vocation, the roaring, and moaning of a tiger in the mangroves. Ben opens the linen closet, dressing in a pair of sweats, and a flannel jacket. 

As he stretches on his coat, the buttons stuck, his right arm bears an immense scar. The angry red eels from his armpit down his tricep to the knobbly bone of his elbow. Another deformity branches his forearm, the scarring puckered from his once splintered radius, the bones of his arm once crushed like a bag of chips. 

He roots around the cupboards for quick food, he finds a can of peaches, forking the fruit and slurping the syrup wolfishly. As he devours the contents of the can, he presses his ear to his mother's door listening for her stirring. 

He hears her light snoring, the rustling of bed sheets but nothing more. On the wall, a bleached stain, the shape of a painting gone. The wallpaper, pallid and worn creeps to his mother's oaken door, it is mottled with finches and sparrows, creatures of daylight and happiness. They leer when he comes, they sing of compunction, they taunt his fears. Their wings scrapping like jungles leaves, talons and beaks beating him back, buttony eyes listless of mercy for him, a soul barely larger than a child. 

The flock protects the weak from the snake.

The crunching of tires is what awakens him from his trance, syrup streaming down his fingers from the can. He has lost his place next to his mothers door, stilted back to the kitchens mantel. The hall now a tunnel to a spiders hovel, the birds rustle down. 

He invites the nurse inside, the door jamming on the midcentury lock before squealing open. There is a light mist of rain, it catches the breeze and sprays on the doormat silvering the carpet hairs. 

The nurse ambles in, stomping her boots clean, clapping her jacket. Her short flaxen hair dampened at the fringes, her head hitting the light fixture on her way deeper into the warming home. "For shits, this island is going to the dogs. This weather has more mood swings than a toddlers party.." She barks, plucking the sticky can from his hand and somehow tossing it into the trash, which was to his knowledge still in the cupboard, with the lid sealed. 

Ben frowns. 

Her blue eyes are stern on him, appraising him from his brambly mop, his disheveled mien, down to his holey socks. "You could've at least spruced yourself up. Mary above knows I don't want to see an unshaven man first thing in the morning."

Ben snorts, tucking on his boots, rubbing his bristles on his flannel sleeve. "Come to mind, the last boy you ogled turned to stone." There is a tense, pregnant pause before she belts out a laugh. She is a Nemean lion, but he has pockets full of the best bones for her. 

But he is always aware of her strength, bandy and tall she boasts a powerhouse of harmful potential, if not a colorful reputation. He remembers her telling him of her last assignment, the foul that landed her here, stuck on this barren rock. Reputedly, she had assaulted her last employer, a stouthearted, toffee-nosed man with an ambition that slotted terribly to her own aspirations. He had demanded her expertise to the wrong department, and had foolishly insulted her latest burr cut when she had finally snapped. 

Putatively, she had broken his nose in two places and fractured an eye socket with one punch. Ben enters every interaction with a proverbial chair and whip.

She peels off her jacket, her nursing suit floral pink, her name stitched onto the breast. _P. Hasma._

He has known Patricia for the better part of three years, united formally by carestar, she is his mothers caretaker, but she is also his hostile friend. The clout of this home and of its functions. There is a small, fearful and jealous part of him that knows she will coax and tend his mother into hospice wherein that time arrives and _that his mother will graciously let her..._

Ben ties the thin sashes of his leathery overcoat and tries not to think of it. 

"There are ladies out there that will appreciate your humor, ya know." She wheedles dryly after finding a cache Tupperware cereals and assembling portions of food for breakfast. 

Ben sores over that. "I'm not interested. I have my brooding, anchorite status to uphold. Besides, there are no _women_ that I'm remotely interested in." 

Patricia rolls her eyes, trying to perilously fork out toast from the toaster. "If you don't go out to town, then, of course, you won't find anyone to be interested in. You aren't doing well to quell the gossip." 

It's Ben's turn to roll his eyes, "Oh god fearing. The wash women are out to get me." He bites his knuckle mockingly, flicking his fingers under his chin. Ben snatches a strand cat hair from her shoulder, leaning on the pie safe. He is piqued. "What has the town cooked up this time? Am I still a skete? Or have I reverted back to the _always_ more favorable occultist?"

"Hm, yes. They have gotten the pitchforks sharpened recently. They are wondering why such a reputable stud hasn't made off with all their available daughters."

His face screws up, the idea of becoming the podunk rooster, sour in his mouth. "Flattering... But once again, no cornpone for me." 

Patricia shrugs, waving a spreading knife over her brawny shoulder at him. "That coffee girl you go see, what's her name? The shops keep daughter? I think she likes you."

Ben's eyes shoot up, stubbled jaw setting displeased. "And why would you know that?" 

"I return the coffee cups, remember? Anyway, we got talking and she said that she thinks you're charming and cute, you know in like a John Keats kind of way." The girl, that Patricia was referring to, she was nice, pleasant to talk with, but something was missing. Not from the interaction, oh no, she was proficient in the art of a transaction and of the eloquent sonorous of small talk. There was something missing in her head, something intelligent needed in rebounding him. Otherwise, it was just like talking to a parrot, practiced words the only thing learned, nothing else, no words from the brain to the lips. 

She was a very dull, dull girl, but nice enough that he didn't want to hurt her feelings.

Ben is insistent, practically snarling in his panic. " _No. No. No._ I make small talk with her, I associate as a customer would. I was very careful about that..."

Patricia's eyes are glowing, a hook keen on the wriggling worm. There is something stuck on her face, it looks like happiness.

"What can I say? You're just oozing magnetism." She bites her lower lip, chuckling. The tip of her nose reddening. 

"You're shitting me? Aren't you?" Ben accuses, eyelids slitten. The explosion of air from her mouth is a crystal clear answer.

She roars with deep-chested laughter. Ben mopes, teeth grinding. "I'm glad you find it funny."

Patricia wipes clear her eyes, giggling mirthfully. Ben tucks his crazy locks behind his ears, biting into his scarf, crunching the wool. He waits for her to compose herself.

"In all seriousness, Ben." She tosses him an apple, lathering a slice of toast with butter. "A girl could do you some good." 

_It didn't the last time..._ Ben can feel the phantom ring on his finger still, he is boring into his skin trying to find a place to hide from her, this ghost. Beneath the thicket of tissue that makes his body, he can feel a core, a fragile nest where his wife eyes cannot peer in from the outside. 

The scars on his body sing like the edges of glass, beaming so strong, they feel like they were cut by rays of light themselves. He twists in the razor thread, a panther of the night snared in the barb wire behind the cattle fence. 

Patricia makes a move to console him, as he is frozen at the door, his hand he realizes has been squeezing the doorknob too tight. But he regains his senses once more--the voice of his wife just the whine of wind outside. 

Ben swings open the door, enjoying the splatter of soft rain, his smile forced. Patricia offers a question that hangs perilously in the air. "Are you alright, Ben? I was just joking..."

The house moans, his insides ache, but he replies. "Fine... Just a long night... _I know, I know._ "

"How is your mother doing? Was she giving you trouble?" This was professional, this question. 

Ben sighs. 

"No. Nothing like that."

 

o0o

The pygmy island takes only forty minutes to walk the coastline entirely. His families property engulfs most of the shore, which includes the Edward Lighthouse he somberly seeks. The island was created during the last Ice Age, a moraine, leftover sediment from a once traveling glacier. 

Thousand of years later, indigenous people homed the island, which was plentiful in cedar trees, a perfect provender for their canoes and longhouses. The island was also abundant in comestible plant life, such as beargrass, cleavers, elephantheads, and woodsorrel. Shallow tide pools and yawning mud flats housed snails, cockles, crabs, and clams. The seaboard was a utopia of stirring, constant life. 

This was such a place, a precarious land to anyone who deemed themselves human. This rock beneath, veined with pulsing energy, the seawater ionizing, the isolation closing in, it all told and warned of an unpredictable element. This island was steeped in First Nation lore, perhaps the most illustrious was of the given reverence to the raven, to which this island was respectfully renamed Reven.

The original title of the settlement had been Fort Moroband, but like the legends of Fernie and The Ghostrider, when the colony jilted and betrayed the indigenous, a curse of calamity was laid. A great fire had swept through the first commune, devastating the settlement and stores and consequentially starving and killing the settlers once the winter befell. Fearful of the supernatural consequences that would come if they further evaded rectification, the survivors donned the island, Reven, the original wish of the indigenous.

Reven Island is impregnated with many fallacies, the common bay seal often confused by fishermen as a mermaid or nymph, the high tors inhabited by howlers and Elmo fire constant rumor among the school kids, the boreal groves thriving with banshees and wendigos, keen on corrupting your soul. 

Ben thinks it a load of humbug. But he cannot help, when leaving his wooden house, to leave without a superstitious thought.

After all what is the reality to stop imagination, but a powerless foe to the churn of the mind fantasies. He ambles down the clapboard pathway, the dawn moon watching him from her monocle. The starry morning is shedding her cloak of diamonds, the horizon alabaster, that dusty color before the pierce of red. 

Ben bites into the apple, the cracking fruit echoing off the pines. The deeper he steps to the beach, the copse thickens like hair from the nape to the scalp.

In the bushy boughs above he can imagine dark spirits peering and rattling, in the waters below there could very well be a mermaid purling seagrass. Ben blames his edginess on the task ahead, there is a more nefarious purpose to his early escapades. Across the strait, the mainland disposes of items through the currents, shoes, clothing, beach balls, toys, but the most abysmal gifts hail from the cliffs, an avid suicide site.

The seas around the island were fraught with treacherous waters, churning traps of water, that sink any caught unawares. There are many that sink and it is here they rise to be claimed. This island had a nasty habit of attracting the dead. While he had the dubious chore of combing the nits of her shore.

This was why he was here, to discover bodies washed here and overlooked.

He was the islands trusted body finder, the local enforcement limited, it would be impossible to have them always sweeping the beachhead, and with his families property laying claim to most if not all the shoreline, he was elected.

The best suitor for the grim job. 

He snorts, grousing over Patricia's advice, the dismaying project of luring a woman to the sack. He cannot deny the desire, the corporeal release building on his pouch. He has long been tight, wound, cinched with a cockle shell in his nethers. The last women he bedded, he had been on a virile binge, the winter long, her face watercolor, his hands like brushes of water. With every romp, she abated from memory, easy to rid and clean himself off of with a single change of the sheets. 

Ben has to challenge himself, sifting like a rat for that last morsel of sustenance. He is always the last rat rowing in the reservoir, his beach of mates vacant long before he arrives. Any woman nearing his age, a mature thirty, who was interested in an affair, a sole fuck, well he always found that they tried chewing for something more. 

No, he was sure Patricia was referring to another sort of commitment, one that didn't involve a bumbling tryst, but a more daring investment, a relationship.

But his home, his suffering, this isolate sore that he reigns over, it is no place for a woman. He lords over his domain of fuck all, these cobs of ash, this beach of floaters, it is all his, just as much as it is him.

It is relieving knowing that his prospects, those he could make suffer with him, would long scare away before he attaches to them.

The job wasn’t all bad, it paid well and it wasn’t like he hadn’t seen dead bodies before. 

If Ben had to think about it, he would rather be the one discovering such dour things, than the squeamish flock. They would forget important details that would later need to be disclosed. 

He was nursed on this macabre family trade. His father scoured the beaches before him, even helped annually dredge the bay, combing for precious remains. His great-grandfather started the tradition when a ferry capsized during a storm and bodies beached throughout the night. 

Today marked the changing of the weather, the ocean changing to a great suckling force, the drive set. This was the block of the calendar, his most engaged time. 

So, his legacy was always twined with morbidity. It had been one of the factors that impelled him to abandon and disown his family at such a young age. It had been a spiral of consequences and ventures that led him to derelict. His youth had been wasted on the pursuit of power, the tang of tyranny, the pleasures of deviation.

His father had left the island, to pursue a better career, far in the north flying bush planes to be away from them. Ben had begged him to take him with him to the mainland. But when that had fallen through, just as so many of the other promises had, he had turned for the worse, leaning on nefarious brothers for guidance. 

It had been his greatest mistake. The needle marks on his arms sting with remembrance. But thankfully, the other scars bury them deep.

Ben sucks in a deep, foggy breath, unlatching the gate to the private shore. 

His boots sink in the white sand as he jogs the patch until bounding up onto more favorable, rocky terrain. He is shrewd in inspecting every boulder and log the tide raised in, divesting every ounce of repulsion as he sticks his arm under sludgy crevices. 

He has been pinched and bitten a few too many times.

He is hopeful that he will not find anything, every day that passes without event is a godsend.

Further out the water he can hear a shrill of petrels and gulls, he quests sight on the swelling waves, watching for bobbing noses of seals or otters. His pocket rustles with a package of gauze and disinfectant spray, just in case he chafes his palms sliding and navigating the slick rocks. 

His families lighthouse, long disused, towers erect out on a stony outcrop.

More forward, there is a tranquil pool amidst the boulders that he works towards. His phone has a flashlight, but the burnishing dawn and islander know-how is enough to guide him to the pool without need.

He dips his hands to the crystal water, rolling and soothing his calloused skin with rich seafoam. He ganders the far shore, jagged and sundry rock, it will be the next place to survey. 

A beam of sunlight finally breaks the horizon, sparking the pool a marbling tiger rose. He is transfixed by the fusion, dabbling his fingers playfully more so than just to rinse clean. Clingfish wiggle off the rock, scudding away in the gold, disturbed. 

But that is when he sees it- _floating there, bobbing on the pools surface, two feet, toenails glittering._

There is a lump of disappointment, he'd rather go back through torrid, tough times and not find anyone again. He'd rather be permanently poor, stuck in penury. But there she is, laid out before him, the first corpse of the season, his meal ticket. 

He is not allowed to touch them. It's a sordid, impersonal affair, a simple look, and report. He pulls out his phone, dialing for the private office, but his finger hovers over the connect, contemplating. 

_It wouldn't hurt to just sit here and reverent in silence. It might be the only one she gets..._

The squirming nerves he once had are gone, there is only a healthy curiosity and respect for the body washed-up on his territory. He does not fear the dead. It is a natural state, no more confounding then hair growing on the legs, or bodies mingling in coitus. Death was the peaceful era, the end to a chaotic, self-aware spastic. It was birth, the violent launch, the beginning of the end, the stipple that all life starts from to the fungus that devours all that remains. It was the journey between these two gates that many counted as most important, Ben worried himself over how to end his own chapter. Just as puzzling as to how he started, how would he depart? 

He looks to her body, and doesn't see an aberration, but sees a sibling. A sistering body, a doom that will be his, her body a fleshy extension of his own. Ben decides to investigate his hopeless brethren... Her legs are thin, and perhaps the light is playing tricks on his eyes, but her skin is still rosy under the golden glow of morning. 

She is wearing a shift, plain and modest, but the fabric, an unfortunate seam, is useless in shrouding her, the dress clinging and dusky skin revealed underneath.

Her hair appears to be curiously dry, as if she was napping, with just her lower body soaking in the numbing water. By the fairness of her face, the youthful lift, she had to be in her early twenties or late teens. Her hair, braided prettily, the prismed color of almond husk, is parted into three, folded buns. 

Her head is left lolling on the spongy shore rock, her collarbones brow over much more interesting fare.

She has a dusting of freckles along the bridge of her nose. Her mouth isn't plopped open like most corpses he finds but set into a firm, pouting line. 

Ben doesn't like it.

She looks like a child caught in a bad dream. It is a natural inclination to try and comfort a distressed child, which only spirals into him thinking, knowing that she is someone's kid. 

That she, is someones baby. 

The water ripples, gilded streams, black mussels her pillows. Her fingers aren't swollen like fingerling potatoes, but they are pruned, delicate, with the fingers daintily touching the thumb.

She is above all else, strangely exquisite.

Ben can't decide what motivated him to break the only rule he has, the cardinal, perhaps at first it was just to move her lips, but he reaches out, hand in the water, and threads his fingers through her own. 

He is disturbed by the warmth bleeding through. He is fucking terrified when she opens her eyes- 

Her hand tightens, nails piercing him and he knows that he somehow must be dead too, or close to dying because this cannot be real.

Her voice is dazed, it is enraged, it is stupendously powerful for someone who is suppose to be dead, and it boils him down to the bone in sheer confusion. 

Her face once the lifeless kind, has changed, it is flustering with a deep, blood-rich purple, he is fearful that this is a bizarre stage of decomposition. That perhaps, she'll blow like a rotting whale under the baking sun. 

But it wanes, draining into a pallid look of shock and vexation. Her fine, mouse-colored brows knit together, her nails drawing blood from him.

She hisses, arching her back in a show of aggravation until he is the one left blanching. "What...are you...doing in my bedroom?!"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I apologize for the delay. This chapter has been sitting in my archive for well over 12 months, untouched. _Let's just see where this goes._
> 
> I want to thank Celticbreeze, 6may, mea_19, ViolatheForceWhisperer, for motivating me to continue with this story. All future support will be greatly appreciated and well used.

**Author's Note:**

> This is just a foreword to the eventual story I'll post. _Maybe..._ Leave a comment if you would like to see more.


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